Consciousness Explained

The world provides an inexhaustible deluge of information bombarding our senses, and when we concentrate on how much is coming in, or continuously available, we often succumb to the illusion that it all must be used, all the time. But our capacities to use information, and our epistemic appetites, are limited.

…even if we turn out to be dead wrong about some of the currently accepted answers, we know how to go about looking for better answers.

If everyone forgot what money was, there wouldn’t be any money anymore; there would be stacks of engraved paper slips, embossed metal disks, computerized records of account balances, granite and marble bank buildings— but no money: no inflation or deflation or exchange rates or interest—or monetary value. The very property of those variously engraved slips of paper that explains—as nothing else could—their trajectories from hand to hand in the wake of various deeds and exchanges would evaporate.

When we understand consciousness—when there is no more mystery— consciousness will be different, but there will still be beauty, and more room than ever for awe.

Events that happen in your brain, just like events that happen in your stomach or your liver, are not normally witnessed by anyone, nor does it make any difference to how they happen whether they occur witnessed or unwitnessed. Events in consciousness, on the other hand, are “by definition

in imagination,

Either smoothly tracking or jumping in saccades, our eyes provide our brains with high-resolution information about whatever is momentarily occupying the central foveal area of the retinal field.

There can be no doubt that having the alarm system of pain fibers and the associated tracts in the brain is an evolutionary boon, even if it means paying the price of having some alarms ring that we can’t do anything about.

According to common agreement among philosophers, a zombie is or would be a human being who exhibits perfectly natural, alert, loquacious, vivacious behavior but is in fact not conscious at all, but rather some sort of automaton.

Sometimes, for instance, people want to say things not because they believe them but because they believe their audience wants to hear them.

You are not authoritative about what is happening in you, but only about what seems to be happening in you and we are giving you total, dictatorial authority over the account of how it seems to you, about what it is like to be you.

If you retort, “I’m not just saying that I can’t describe it; I’m saying it’s indescribable!

Some devoutly religious people, for instance, take offense when interlocutors so much as hint that there might be some alternative true religion.

This fictional world is populated with all the images, events, sounds, smells, hunches, presentiments, and feelings that the subject (apparently) sincerely believes to exist in his or her (or its) stream of consciousness. “ “There is no cell or group of cells in the brain of such anatomical or functional preeminence as to appear to be the keystone or center of gravity of the whole system.

Pleasure-boaters sailing along a tricky coast usually make sure they stay out of harm’s way by steering for a mark. They find some visible but distant buoy in roughly the direction they want to go, check the chart to make sure there are no hidden obstacles on the straight line between the mark and where they are, and then head straight for it. For maybe an hour or more the skipper’s goal is to aim directly at the mark, correcting all errors. Every so often, however, skippers get so lulled by this project that they forget to veer off at the last minute and actually hit the buoy head on! They get distracted from the larger goal of staying out of trouble by the reassuring success they are having with the smaller goal of heading for the mark.

Wherever there is a conscious mind, there is a point of view.

A conscious mind is an observer, who takes in a limited subset of all the information there is. An observer takes in the information that is available at a particular (roughly) continuous sequence of times and places in the universe. For most practical purposes, we can consider the point of view of a particular conscious subject to be just that: a point moving through space-time.

The brain is Headquarters, the place where the ultimate observer is, but there is no reason to believe that the brain itself has any deeper headquarters, any inner sanctum, arrival at which is the necessary or sufficient condition for conscious experience. In short, there is no observer inside the brain.

the clarity of the peripheries gives us no guarantee that the same distinctions will continue to apply all the way in.

We must stop thinking of the brain as if it had such a single functional summit or central point.

According to the Multiple Drafts model, all varieties of perception— indeed, all varieties of thought or mental activity—are accomplished in the brain by parallel, multitrack processes of interpretation and elaboration of sensory inputs. Information entering the nervous system is under continuous “editorial revision.

We don’t directly experience what happens on our retinas, in our ears, on the surface of our skin. What we actually experience is a product of many processes of interpretation—editorial processes, in effect. They take in relatively raw and one-sided representations, and yield collated, revised, enhanced representations, and they take place in the streams of activity occurring in various parts of the brain.

Suppose you are standing on the corner and a long-haired woman dashes by. About one second after this, a subterranean memory of some earlier woman—a short-haired woman with eyeglasses—contaminates the memory of what you have just seen: when asked a minute later for details of the woman you just saw, you report, sincerely but erroneously, her eyeglasses. (..) For that brief moment, the reality of your conscious experience was a long-haired woman without eyeglasses, but this historical fact has become inert; it has left no trace, thanks to the contamination of memory that came one second after you glimpsed her.

There is abundant evidence that responses under conscious control, while slower than such responses as reflex blinks, occur with close to the minimum latencies (delays) that are physically possible.

Similarly—and this is the fundamental implication of the Multiple Drafts model —if one wants to settle on some moment of processing in the brain as the moment of consciousness, this has to be arbitrary. One can always “draw a line

What Nelson Goodman overlooks is the possibility that the brain doesn’t actually have to go to the trouble of “filling in

construction

Visual stimuli evoke trains of events in the cortex that gradually yield discriminations of greater and greater specificity. At different times and different places, various “decisions

judgments

semantic readiness

in consciousness.

perceptual set

There is nothing metaphysically extravagant or challenging about this failure of registration.11 It is no more mysterious or contra-causal than the realization that the individual scenes in movies are often shot out of sequence, or that when you read the sentence “Bill arrived at the party after Sally, but Jane came earlier than both of them,

Stalinesque theorist, that stimuli can have their effects on us without our being conscious of them. The first stimulus never plays on the stage of consciousness, but has whatever effects it has entirely unconsciously.

Orwellian alternative: subjects are indeed conscious of the first stimulus (which explains their capacity to guess correctly) but their memory of this conscious experience is almost entirely obliterated by the second stimulus (which is why they deny having seen it, in spite of their telltale better-than- chance guesses).

Here is how the Multiple Drafts model deals with metacontrast. When a lot happens in a short time, the brain may make simplifying assumptions. The outer contour of a disc rapidly turns into the inner contour of a ring. The brain, initially informed just that something happened (something with a circular contour in a particular place), swiftly receives confirmation that there was indeed a ring, with an inner and outer contour. Without further supporting evidence that there was a disc, the brain arrives at the conservative conclusion that there was only a ring. Should we insist that the disc was experienced because if the ring hadn’t intervened the disc would have been reported? That would be to make the mistake of supposing we could “freeze-frame

The brain’s task is to guide the body it controls through a world of shifting conditions and sudden surprises, so it must gather information from that world and use it swiftly to “produce future

Perhaps all afferent nerve tracts are like spring-loaded windup tape measures —and all the same length: the nerves to the toes are fully unwound, those to the forehead are mainly coiled in the brain. “ “Imposing a master synchrony on operations requires delays. “ “What matters for the brain is not necessarily when individual representing events happen in various parts of the brain (as long as they happen in time to control the things that need controlling!) but their temporal content. That is, what matters is that the brain can proceed to control events “under the assumption that A happened before B

[T]he striking fact… should be noticed, namely that perceptions of temporal order need temporally ordered perceptions. No other property or relation has to be thus embodied in perceptions of it [my italics]: perceptions of shape and colour, for example, need not themselves be correspondingly shaped or coloured.

So the brain’s representing of time is anchored to time itself in two ways: the very timing of the representing can be what provides the evidence or determines the content, and the whole point of representing the time of things can be lost if the representing doesn’t happen in time to make the difference it is supposed to make.

We’ve established a way in which the brain can do its editorial work on temporal information in a fashion that ignores the actual timing (the “time of arrival

in consciousness

dog dog dog…

Libet’s reply is Stalinesque: A verbal reaction—saying “go

There is nothing magical or uniquely informative when the motor response is a vocalization of the word ‘go’ instead of the more usual one of a finger tapping a button.… The ability to detect a stimulus and to react to it purposefully, or be psychologically influenced by it, without any reportable conscious awareness of the stimulus, is widely accepted

But what did Churchland’s subjects think they were doing, if not saying, as requested, just when they were conscious of the stimulus?

an uncertain validity as a primary criterion of a subjective experience

The report is made unhurriedly within a few seconds after each trial, allowing the subject to introspectively examine his evidence

The issue has been obscured by the fact that both proponent and critic have failed to distinguish consistently between time of representing and time represented. They talk past each other, with Libet adopting a Stalinesque position and Churchland making the Orwellian countermoves, both apparently in agreement that there is a fact of the matter about exactly when (in “absolute

He found evidence that these “conscious decisions

readiness potentials

cerebral initiation of a spontaneous voluntary act begins unconsciously

executive role

the conscious self.

One should not confuse what is reported by the subject with when he may become introspectively aware of what he is reporting

He claims that when conscious intentions to act (at least of his special sort) are put into registration with the brain events that actually initiate the acts, there is an offset in the 300-500msec range. This is huge—up to half a second—and it does look ominous to anyone committed to the principle that our conscious acts control our bodily motions. It looks as if we are located in Cartesian Theaters where we are shown, with a half-second tape delay, the real decision-making that is going on elsewhere (somewhere we aren’t). We are not quite “out of the loop

triggers.

does present a problem, but was not experimentally testable

The time of occurrence

it all come together at an instant in consciousness

The all-too-natural vision that we must discard is the following: Somewhere deep in the brain an act-initiation begins; it starts out as an unconscious intention, and slowly makes its way to the Theater, picking up definiteness and power as it goes, and then, at an instant, t, it bursts onstage, where a parade of visual spot-representations are marching past, having made their way slowly from the retina, getting clothed with brightness and location as they moved. The audience or I is given the task of saying which spot- representation was “onstage

The signing of the truce was one official, intentional act of the Empire, but the participation by the British forces in the Battle of New Orleans was another, and it was an act performed under the assumption that no truce had yet been signed. A case might be made for the principle that the arrival of the news at Whitehall or Buckingham Palace in London should be considered the official time at which the Empire was informed, since this was the “nerve center

The key to control is the ability to track or even anticipate the important features of the environment, so all brains are, in essence, anticipation machines.

No nervous system, at that early time, had any way to use a more dispassionate or objective “message

Becoming informed (fallibly) that another animal is looking at you is almost always an event of significance in the natural world. If the animal doesn’t want to eat you, it might be a potential mate, or a rival for a mate, or a prey who has spotted your approach.

Regular vigilance gradually turned into regular exploration, and a new behavioral strategy began to evolve: the strategy of acquiring information “for its own sake,

We all assume that the future will be like the past—it is the essential but unprovable premise of all our inductive inferences, as Hume noted. Mother Nature (the design-developer realized in the processes of natural selection) makes the same assumption. (…) But sometimes the opportunities and vicissitudes in the environment are relatively unpredictable by Mother Nature or by anyone—they are, or are influenced by, processes that are chaotic (Dennett, 1984a, p. 109ff). In these cases, no one stereotyped design will accommodate itself to all eventualities, so better organisms will be those that can redesign themselves to some degree to meet the conditions they encounter. Sometimes such redesign is called learning and sometimes it is called just development.

For our purposes, let’s just say that one way or another, the plastic brain is capable of reorganizing itself adaptively in response to the particular novelties encountered in the organism’s environment, and the process by which the brain does this is almost certainly a mechanical process strongly analogous to natural selection.

As the figure makes clear, only one wiring is favored; the others, no matter how “close

Those animals whose brains start out closer to the target will have a survival advantage over those who start far away, even though there is no other selective advantage to being born with a “near miss

far miss

If we give individuals a variable chance to hit upon (and then “recognize

cling to

a miss is as good as a mile

The astonishing hominid brain growth was essentially complete before the development of language, and so cannot be a response to the complexities of mind that language has made possible. The innate specializations for language, hypothesized by the linguist Noam Chomsky and others, and now beginning to be confirmed in details of neuroanatomy, are a very recent and rushed add-on, no doubt an exploitation of earlier sequencing circuitry (Calvin, 1989a) accelerated by the Baldwin Effect. Moreover, the most remarkable expansion of human mental powers (as witnessed by the development of cooking, agriculture, art, and, in a word, civilization) has all happened even more recently, since the end of the last ice age, in a 10,000-year twinkling that is as good as instantaneous from the evolutionary perspective that measures trends in millions of years. Our brains are equipped at birth with few if any powers that were lacking in the brains of our ancestors 10,000 years ago. So the tremendous advance of Homo sapiens in the last 10,000 years must almost all be due to harnessing the plasticity of that brain in radically new ways—by creating something like software to enhance its underlying powers (Dennett, 1986).

Some of the variability in a brain is required simply to provide a medium for the moment-to-moment transient patterns of brain activity that somehow register or at any rate track the importantly variable features of the environment.

Some of the variability in a brain is required simply to provide a medium for the moment-to-moment transient patterns of brain activity that somehow register or at any rate track the importantly variable features of the environment. Something in the brain needs to change so that it can keep track of the bird that flies by, or the drop in air temperature, or one of the organism’s own states—the drop in blood sugar, the increase of carbon dioxide in the lungs. Moreover—and this is the fulcrum that gives genuine representation its leverage—these transient internal patterns come to be able to continue to “track

A zebra which has caught sight of a lion does not forget where the lion is when it stops watching the lion for a moment. The lion does not forget where the zebra is

How can a particular state or event in the brain represent one feature of the world rather than another?7 And whatever it is that makes some feature of the brain represent what it represents, how does it come to represent what it represents? Here once again (I’m afraid this refrain is going to get tedious!) there are a range of possibilities, settled by evolutionary processes: some elements of the system of representation can be—indeed must be (Dennett, 1969)—innately fixed, and the rest must be “learned.

Plasticity makes learning possible, but it is all the better if somewhere out there in the environment there is something to learn that is already the product of a prior design process, so that each of us does not have to reinvent the wheel. Cultural evolution, and transmission of its products, is the second new medium of evolution, and it depends on phenotypic plasticity in much the same way phenotypic plasticity depends on genetic variation. We human beings have used our plasticity not just to learn, but to learn how to learn better, and then we’ve learned better how to learn better how to learn better, and so forth. We have also learned how to make the fruits of this learning available to novices. We somehow install an already invented and largely “debugged

Then one fine day (in this rational reconstruction), one of these hominids “mistakenly

broadcast

virtual wire

Talking aloud is only one possibility. Drawing pictures to yourself is another readily appreciated act of self-manipulation.

The human talent for inventing new paths of internal communication occasionally shows itself vividly in cases of brain damage. People are extraordinarily good at overcoming brain damage, and it is never a matter of “healing

Most of the wiring in the body is arranged contralaterally, with the left hemisphere getting its information from—and controlling—the right side of the body, and vice versa.

There are, after all, many existent varieties of autostimulation and self- manipulation that presumably have no valuable effect on cognition or control, but which, for standard Darwinian reasons, fail to be extinguished and may even drift to (cultural or genetic) fixation in certain subpopulations. Likely candidates are painting yourself blue, beating yourself with birch boughs, cutting patterns in your skin, starving yourself, saying a “magical

Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperm or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain.

Meme evolution is not just analogous to biological or genetic evolution, not just a process that can be metaphorically described in these evolutionary idioms, but a phenomenon that obeys the laws of natural selection exactly. The theory of evolution by natural selection is neutral regarding the differences between memes and genes; these are just different kinds of replicators evolving in different media at different rates. And just as the genes for animals could not come into existence on this planet until the evolution of plants had paved the way (creating the oxygen-rich atmosphere and ready supply of convertible nutrients), so the evolution of memes could not get started until the evolution of animals had paved the way by creating a species—Homo sapiens—with brains that could provide shelter, and habits of communication that could provide transmission media, for memes.“ “Human consciousness is to a very great degree a product not just of natural selection, but of cultural evolution as well. The best way to see the contribution of memes to the creation of our minds is to follow the standard steps of evolutionary thinking closely.

While some memes definitely manipulate us into collaborating on their replication in spite of our judging them useless or ugly or even dangerous to our health and welfare, many—most, if we’re lucky—of the memes that replicate themselves do so not just with our blessings, but because of our esteem for them.

Genes are invisible; they are carried by gene vehicles (organisms) in which they tend to produce characteristic effects (“phenotypic

Meme vehicles inhabit our world alongside all the fauna and flora, large and small. By and large they are “visible

Our meme-immunological systems are not foolproof, but not hopeless either. We can rely, as a general, crude rule of thumb, on the coincidence of the two perspectives: by and large, the good memes are the ones that are also the good replicators.

Memes, like genes, are potentially immortal, but, like genes, they depend on the existence of a continuous chain of physical vehicles, persisting in the face of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Books are relatively permanent, and inscriptions on monuments even more permanent, but unless these are under the protection of human conservators, they tend to dissolve in time. As with genes, immortality is more a matter of replication than of the longevity of individual vehicles. The preservation of the Platonic memes, via a series of copies of copies, is a particularly striking case of this. “ “the meme for faith exhibits frequency-dependent fitness: it flourishes best when it is out-numbered by rationalistic memes; in an environment with few skeptics, the meme for faith tends to fade from disuse. Other concepts from population genetics also transfer smoothly: here is a case of what a geneticist would call linked loci: two memes that happen to be physically tied together so that they tend always to replicate together, a fact that affects their chances. There is a magnificent ceremonial march, familiar to many of us, and one that would be much used for commencements, weddings, and other festive occasions, perhaps driving “Pomp and Circumstance

Behold the Lord High Executioner.

Normal human brains are not all alike; they vary considerably in size, shape, and in the myriad details of connection on which their prowess depends. But the most striking differences in human prowess depend on microstructural differences induced by the various memes that have entered them and taken up residence. The memes enhance each others’ opportunities: the meme for education, for instance, is a meme that reinforces the very process of meme- implantation.

The “independent

side with

The Baldwin Effect does speed up evolution, favoring the movement of individually discovered Good Tricks into the genome, by the indirect path of creating new selection pressures resulting from widespread adoption by individuals of the Good Tricks. But cultural evolution, which happens much faster still, permits individuals to acquire, through cultural transmission, Good Tricks that have been honed by predecessors who are not even their genetic ancestors. So potent are the effects of such a sharing of good designs that cultural evolution has probably obliterated all but a few of the gentle pressures of the Baldwin Effect. The design improvements one receives from one’s culture—one seldom has to “reinvent the wheel

Human consciousness is itself a huge complex of memes (or more exactly, meme-effects in brains) that can best be understood as the operation of a “von Neumannesque

Conscious human minds are more-or-less serial virtual machines implemented—inefficiently—on the parallel hardware that evolution has provided for us.

There are several methods of sharing such software: learning by imitation, learning as a result of “reinforcement

Tell me what you are doing,

Tell me why you are doing that.

What Plato saw was that merely having the birds is not enough; the hard part is learning how to get the right bird to come to you when you call. He went on to claim that by reasoning, we improve our capacity to get the right birds to come at the right time. Learning to reason is, in effect, learning knowledge- retrieval strategies.19 That is where habits of mind come in. We have already seen in crude outline how such general habits of mind as talking-to-yourself or diagraming-to-yourself might happen to tease the right morsels of information to the surface (the surface of what?—a topic I will defer to chapter 10). But more specific habits of mind, refinements and elaborations of specific ways of talking to yourself, can improve your chances even further.

Le Penseur’s frown and chin-holding, and the head-scratchings, mutterings, pacings, and doodlings that we idiosyncratically favor, could turn out to be not just random by-products of conscious thinking but functional contributors (or the vestigial traces of earlier, cruder functional contributors) to the laborious disciplining of the brain that had to be accomplished to turn it into a mature mind.

Thanks to ingenious experiments that provoke such errors, and intricate analyses of what does and doesn’t happen when people speak, progress is being made on models of the highly organized mechanisms that execute the ultimate articulation of a message once it has been decided that a particular message is to be released to the outside world. But who or what puts this machinery in motion? A speech error is an error in virtue of being other than what the speaker meant to say.

If Birnbaum and Collins are right, creative language use can be accomplished only by a parallel process in which multiple goals are simultaneously on the alert for materials.

It is no news that some of what we say we say primarily because we like the way it sounds, not because we like what it means.

You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you can not fool all the people all of the time.

Although we are occasionally conscious of performing elaborate practical reasoning, leading to a conclusion about what, all things considered, we ought to do, followed by a conscious decision to do that very thing, and culminating finally in actually doing it, these are relatively rare experiences. Most of our intentional actions are performed without any such preamble, and a good thing, too, since there wouldn’t be time. The standard trap is to suppose that the relatively rare cases of conscious practical reasoning are a good model for the rest, the cases in which our intentional actions emerge from processes into which we have no access. Our actions generally satisfy us; we recognize that they are in the main coherent, and that they make appropriate, well-timed contributions to our projects as we understand them. So we safely assume them to be the product of processes that are reliably sensitive to ends and means. “ “In a Thumbnail Sketch, here is my theory so far: There is no single, definitive “stream of consciousness,

it all comes together

narrative

von Neumannesque

hard- wired

Instead of such a single stream (however wide), there are multiple channels in which specialist circuits try, in parallel pandemoniums, to do their various things, creating Multiple Drafts as they go. Most of these fragmentary drafts of “narrative

the importance of data structures that are not just sequences of “snapshots

The perceptual psychologist V. S. Ramachandran (1991), notes that “there is an actual advantage which appears in multiple systems: it buys you tolerance for noisy images of the kind that you encounter in the real world. My favorite analogy to illustrate some of these ideas is that it is a bit like two drunks; neither of them can walk unsupported but by leaning on each other they manage to stagger towards their goal.

The original IF-THENs were Turing’s simple, clear-cut machine-state instructions: IF you see a zero, THEN replace it with a one, move one space left, and switch to state n. Contrast such simple instructions with the sort you might give a well-trained and experienced human sentry: IF you see something that looks unfamiliar to you, AND further investigation does not resolve the issue OR you have residual doubts, THEN sound the alarm.

all production systems share a few basic assumptions that provide a bridge to our theory sketch: they have a workspace where the action happens, where many productions (= demons) can try to do their thing at once, and they have a more or less inert memory where innate and accumulated information is stored.

Just as expected, the brain excitation can be seen to arise first in those parts of the visual cortex that represent (à la the House of Representatives) various features of events in the upper left quadrant of vision, but these hot spots immediately become sources for spreading activation, involving cortical agents with other constituencies. If this spread of arousal across areas of cortex isn’t just leakage or noise, if it plays some crucial role in elaborating or facilitating the editing of a draft of a narrative fragment, these recruited agents must play a role quite different from their role when they are the anchoring source.

human engineers, with their imperfect foresight, train themselves to design systems in which each element plays a single role, carefully insulated from interference from outside, in order to minimize the devastation of unforeseen side effects. Mother Nature, on the other hand, does not worry about foreseeing side effects, and so can capitalize on serendipitous side effects when they show up—once in a blue moon.

Simple or overlearned tasks without serious competition can be routinely executed without the enlistment of extra forces, and hence unconsciously, but when a task is difficult or unpleasant, it requires “concentration,

We’re good, but not fantastic. The habits of self-manipulation we develop turn us into wily exploiters of our hard-won resources; we don’t always get the right bird to sing at the right time, but often enough to make us pretty good company.

Couldn’t there be an unconscious being with an internal global workspace in which demons broadcast messages to demons, forming coalitions and all the rest? If so, then the stunning human power of swift, versatile adjustment of mental state in response to almost any contingency, however novel, owes nothing to consciousness itself, but just to the computational architecture that makes this intercommunication possible. If consciousness is something over and above the Joycean machine, I have not yet provided a theory of consciousness at all, even if other puzzling questions have been answered. Until the whole theory-sketch was assembled, I had to deflect such doubts, but at last it is time to grasp the nettle, and confront consciousness itself, the whole marvelous mystery. And so I hereby declare that YES, my theory is a theory of consciousness. Anyone or anything that has such a virtual machine as its control system is conscious in the fullest sense, and is conscious because it has such a virtual machine.

Diagrams do indeed amount to re-presentations of the information—not to an inner eye, but to an inner pattern-recognition mechanism that can also accept input from a regular (“outer

Diagrams don’t just help us see patterns that might otherwise be imperceptible; they can help us keep track of what is relevant, and remind us to ask the right questions at the right times.

There need be no time and place where “it all comes together

The British economist John Maynard Keynes was once asked whether he thought in words or pictures. “I think in thoughts,

things we think in

mental images

As Levelt points out (1989, sec. 3.6), the obligatory structures of sentences in our languages are like so many guides at our elbows, reminding us to check on this, to attend to that, requiring us to organize facts in certain ways. Some of this structure may indeed be innate, as Chomsky and others have argued, but it really doesn’t matter where the dividing line is drawn between structures that are genetically deposited in the brain and those that enter as memes. These structures, real or virtual, lay down some of the tracks on which “thoughts

What good could talking to yourself do, if you already know what you intended to say? But once we see the possibility of partial understanding, imperfect rationality, problematic intercommunication of parts, we can see how the powerful forces that a language unleashes in a brain can be exploited in various forms of bootstrapping, some of them beneficial, and some of them malignant.

Dale Carnegie was right about the power of positive thinking, but like most technologies, thinking is easier to create than to control. When you talk to yourself, you don’t have to believe yourself in order for reactions to set in. There are bound to be some reactions, and they are bound to be relevant one way or the other to the meaning of the words with which you are stimulating yourself. Once the reactions start happening, they may lead your mind to places where you find yourself believing yourself after all—so be careful what you say to yourself.

Looking at ourselves from the computer viewpoint, we cannot avoid seeing that natural language is our most important “programming language.

We have scant access to the processes by which words “occur to us

I was going to use the word jejune but stopped myself, since it would have sounded so pretentious.

What happens when we speak? At the heart of our everyday conception of this there is a truism: Provided we’re not lying or insincere, we say what we think. To put it more elaborately, we express one of our beliefs or thoughts. Suppose, for instance, you see the cat anxiously waiting by the refrigerator and you say, “The cat wants his supper.

my desire is distinct from my belief that I have the desire, which is distinct from my belief that I have the desire, and so on.

The second-order thought does not itself have to be conscious in order for its first-order object to be conscious. You can express a thought without being conscious of it, so you can express a second-You can express a thought without being conscious of it, so you can express a second-order thought without being conscious of it—all you need be conscious of is its object, the first-order thought you report. This may seem surprising at first, but on reflection we can recognize this as a familiar fact in a new perspective: You do not attend to the thought you express, but to the object(s) that though is about.

Unconscious thoughts are, for instance, unconscious perceptual events, or episodic activations of beliefs, that occurs naturally- that must occur - in the course of normal behaviour control.

Philosophers’ zombies, you will recall, seem to perform speech acts, seem to report on their states of consciousness, seem to introspect. But they are not really conscious at all, in spite of the fact that they are, at their best, behaviorally indistinguishable from a conscious person. They may have internal states with functional content (the sort of content that functionalists can assign to the inner machinery of robots), but these are unconscious states.

Shakey didn’t have any access into why he wanted to say he was forming line drawings around the light-dark boundaries of his mental images—he was just built that way. (…) You don’t have any special access into why you want to say what you find you want to say; you are just built that way. But, unlike Shakey, you are constantly rebuilding yourself, discovering new things you want to say as a result of reflecting on what you have just found yourself wanting to say, and so forth.

A zimbo is a zombie that, as a result of self-monitoring, has internal (but unconscious) higher-order informational states that are about its other, lower- order informational states. “ “For most computer-users, it is only in terms of these metaphors that they have any appreciation of what is happening inside. This is one of the facts that makes a virtual machine such a tempting analogy for consciousness, for it has always seemed that our access to what is happening inside our own brains is limited; we don’t have to know how the backstage machinery of our brains does its magic; we are acquainted with its operations only as they come clothed for us in the interactive metaphors of phenomenology. But if, when we avail ourselves of this tempting analogy, we maintain the “obvious

I believe that p because I have been told by a reliable source that p. By whom? By myself—or at any rate, by one or more of my “agents.

If I couldn’t talk to myself, I’d have no way of knowing what I was thinking. This is not yet quite the right way to think of it, in several regards. First, there is the difference—which I have been glossing over—between one entity “talking to itself

talking to each other.

(If you can “misspeak,

misthink

Even if it is intuitively plausible that you cannot be mistaken about how it is with you right now, it is not at all intuitively plausible that you cannot be mistaken about how it was with you back then. If the experience you are reporting is a past experience, your memory—on which you rely in your report—might be contaminated by error. Perhaps your experience was actually one way, but you now misremember it as having been another way. It certainly could seem to you now to have seemed to you then to have been a horse—even if in fact it seemed to you then to have been a cow. The logical possibility of misremembering is opened up no matter how short the time interval between actual experience and subsequent recall—this is what gave Orwellian theories their license.

First, we persist in the habit of positing a separate process of observation (now of inner observation) intervening between the circumstances about which we can report and the report we issue—overlooking the fact that at some point this regress of interior observers must be stopped by a process that unites contents with their verbal expression without any intermediary content- appreciator. And second, internal communications created in this way do in fact have the effect of organizing our minds into indefinitely powerful reflective or self-monitoring systems. Such powers of reflection have often been claimed to be at the heart of consciousness, with good reason.

Close one eye and look at the cross, holding the page about ten inches from your eyes. One of the “blind spot

It seems, then, that there are two kinds of behavioral policies: those controlled by conscious thought and those controlled by “blind, mechanical

A bit-map, by explicitly labeling each pixel, is a form of what we may call roughly continuous representation—the roughness is a function of the size of the pixels. A bit-map is not literally an image, but just an array of values, a sort of recipe for forming an image. The array can be stored in any system that preserves information about location. Videotape is yet another medium of roughly continuous representation, but what it stores on the tape is not literally images, but recipes (at a different grain level) for forming images.

The fundamental flaw in the idea of “filling in

One of the most striking features of consciousness is its continuity

Nothing can seem jerky except what is represented as jerky. Paradoxically, our sense of continuity comes from our marvelous insensitivity to most kinds of changes rather than from any genuine perceptiveness

The brain’s motto for handling the blind spot could be: Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.

Once again, the absence of representation is not the same as the representation of absence. And the representation of presence is not the same as the presence of representation.

Now how could we, as Users of our own brain-libraries, know which of the items we retrieve were there all along, and which our brains sent out for, in swift information-gathering forays into the external world? Careful experiments, conducted according to the heterophenomenological method, can answer this question, but introspection by itself simply can’t tell. That doesn’t stop us from thinking we can tell, however. In the absence of any evidence one way or the other, our natural tendency is to jump to the conclusion that more is present. I have called this the Introspective Trap (Dennett, 1969, pp. 139–140) and Minsky calls it the Immanence Illusion: “Whenever you can answer a question without a noticeable delay, it seems as though that answer were already active in your mind

In the experimental situation I was in, words on the screen were being erased and replaced during my saccades. If your parafoveal vision can’t discriminate the word at ground zero before you saccade to it, once you get there and identify it, there can’t be any prior record or memory of it in your brain The switch can’t be noticed because the information logically required for such a noticing is simply not there. Of course it seems to you as you read this page that all the words on the line are in some sense present in your consciousness (in the background) even before you specifically attend to them, but this is an illusion. They are only virtually present.

First, get rid of the Central Meaner by distributing all his judgments around in time and space in the brain—each act of discrimination or discernment or content-fixation happens somewhere, but there is no one Discerner doing all the work. And second, get rid of the Language of Thought; the content of the judgments doesn’t have to be expressible in “propositional

Are you denying then that consciousness is a plenum? Yes indeed. That’s part of what I’m denying. Consciousness is gappy and sparse, and doesn’t contain half of what people think is there!

The idea that the Self—or the Soul—is really just an abstraction strikes many people as simply a negative idea, a denial rather than anything positive. But in fact it has a lot going for it, including—if it matters to you—a somewhat more robustly conceived version of potential immortality than anything to be found in traditional ideas of a soul…

in the world

eye and brain

The sort of difference that people imagine there to be between any machine and any human experiencer (recall the wine-tasting machine we imagined in chapter 2) is one I am firmly denying: There is no such sort of difference. There just seems to be.

We tend to think of color-coding as the clever introduction of “conventional

needed to be seen

Fruits that are not color-coded compete poorly on the shelves of nature’s supermarket, but false advertising will be punished; the fruits that are ripe (full of nutrition) and that advertise that fact will sell better, but the advertising has to be tailored to the visual capabilities and proclivities of the target consumers

Once there were creatures who could distinguish red from green berries, they could also distinguish red rubies from green emeralds, but this was just a coincidental bonus. The fact that there is a difference in color between rubies and emeralds can thus be considered to be a derived color phenomenon. Why is the sky blue? Because apples are red and grapes are purple, not the other way around. It is a mistake to think that first there were colors—colored rocks, colored water, colored sky, reddish-orange rust and bright blue cobalt—and then Mother Nature came along and took advantage of those properties by using them to color-code things. (…) If the blue of cobalt and the blue of a butterfly’s wing happened to match (in normal human beings’ vision) this is just a coincidence, a negligible side effect of the processes that brought color vision into existence and thereby…

But lovely qualities cannot be defined independently of the proclivities, susceptibilities, or dispositions of a class of observers, so it really makes no sense to speak of the existence of lovely properties in complete independence of the existence of the relevant observers.

Are sea elephants lovely? Not to us. It is hard to imagine an uglier creature. What makes a sea elephant lovely to another sea elephant is not what makes a woman lovely to a man, and to call some as-yet-unobserved woman lovely who, as it happens, would mightily appeal to sea elephants would be to abuse both her and the term. It is only by reference to human tastes, which are contingent and indeed idiosyncratic features of the world, that the property of loveliness (to-a-human-being) can be identified.

You may be eminently worthy of suspicion—you may even be obviously guilty—but you can’t be a suspect until someone actually suspects you. I am not claiming that colors are suspect qualities. Our intuition that the as-yet- unobserved emerald in the middle of the clump of ore is already green does not have to be denied. But I am claiming that colors are lovely qualities, whose existence, tied as it is to a reference class of observers, makes no sense in a world in which the observers have no place.

What property does Otto judge something to have when he judges it to be pink? The property he calls pink. And what property is that? It’s hard to say, but this should not embarrass us, because we can say why it’s hard to say. The best we can do, practically, when asked what surface properties we detect with color vision, is to say, uninformatively, that we detect the properties we detect.

…on evolution, these native alarmists have subsequently been coopted in a host of more complicated organizations, built from millions of associations, and shaped, in the human case, by thousands of memes. In this way the brute come-and-get-it appeal of sex and food, and the brute run-for-your-life aversion of pain and fear get stirred together in all sorts of piquant combinations. When an organism discovers that it pays to attend to some feature of the world in spite of its built-in aversion to doing that, it must construct some countervailing coalition to keep aversion from winning.

Humphrey points out that red is always used to alert, the ultimate color-coding color, but for that very reason ambiguous: the red fruit may be good to eat, but the red snake or insect is probably advertising that it is poisonous. So “red

visceral

We can’t do the job precisely, but only because we can’t forget or abandon all that we know…

Suppose we suggest to Otto that what made his “occurrent pink

This is my quale,

There are the ways things look to me, and sound to me, and smell to me, and so forth. That much is obvious. I wonder, though, if the ways things appear to me are the same as the ways things appear to other people.

No one comes to enjoy the way the first sip tasted. Instead, the way beer tastes to them gradually changes.

When the adaptations of the subjects wearing these goggles have become so second nature that they can ride bicycles and ski, the natural (but misguided) question to ask is this: Have they adapted by turning their experiential world back right side up, or by getting used to their experiential world being upside down?

If he suddenly lost his epiphenomenal qualia, he would no longer believe he had them, but he’d still go right on saying he did. He just wouldn’t believe what he was saying! (Nor could he tell you that he didn’t believe what he was saying, or do anything at all that revealed that he no longer believed what he was saying.) So the only way Otto could “justify

Why don’t I like broccoli? Probably for no reason at all; my negative reactive disposition is purely epiphenomenal, a by-product of my wiring with no significance. It has no function, but has plenty of effects. In any designed system, some properties are crucial while others are more or less revisable ad lib. Everything has to be some way or another, but often the ways don’t matter. The gear shift lever on a car may have to be a certain length and a certain strength, but whether it is round or square or oval in cross section is an epiphenomenal property, in Huxley’s sense.

No other sense of the term has any currency. So if anyone claims to uphold a variety of epiphenomenalism, try to be polite, but ask: What are you talking about? Notice, by the way, that this equivocation between two senses of “epiphenomenal

Equivalently, human bodies with green brains don’t harbor observers, while other human bodies do. On this hypothesis, we would be able in principle to distinguish the inhabited bodies from the uninhabited bodies by checking for brain color. This is also silly, of course, and dangerously silly, for it echoes the sort of utterly unmotivated prejudices that have denied full personhood to people on the basis of the color of their skin. It is time to recognize the idea of the possibility of zombies for what it is: not a serious philosophical idea but a preposterous and ignoble relic of ancient prejudices. Maybe women aren’t really conscious! Maybe Jews! What pernicious nonsense.

There is another way to address the possibility of zombies, and in some regards I think it is more satisfying. Are zombies possible? They’re not just possible, they’re actual. We’re all zombies. Nobody is conscious—not in the systematically mysterious way that supports such doctrines as epiphenomenalism! I can’t prove that no such sort of consciousness exists. I also cannot prove that gremlins don’t exist. The best I can do is show that there is no respectable motivation for believing in it.

I apply my own theory to myself. As heterophenomenologists, our task is to take this text, interpret it, and then relate the objects of the resulting heterophenomenological world of Dennett to the events going on in Dennett’s brain at the time.

Speaking aloud, as every lecturer knows, often reveals implications (and particularly problems) in one’s own message that elude one when one engages in silent soliloquy. As it is, the text portrays a mere portion (and no doubt an idealized portion) of the contents of the author’s consciousness. We must be careful, however, not to suppose that the “parts left out

actually present

took it all in

The fact that some human beings also like looking at microscopic slides of bacteria and others like looking at photographs of airplane crashes is stranger, but the sublimations and perversions of desire grow from the same animal sources in the wiring of our nervous systems.

Suppose that there be a machine, the structure of which produces thinking, feeling, and perceiving; imagine this machine enlarged but preserving the same proportions, so that you could enter it as if it were a mill. This being supposed, you might visit its inside; but what would you observe there? Nothing but parts which push and move each other, and never anything that could explain perception. GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ (1646–1716), Monadology (first published, 1840)

For example, would you please swallow the saliva in your mouth right now? This act does not fill you with revulsion. But suppose I had asked you to get a clean drinking glass and spit into the glass and then swallow the saliva from the glass. Disgusting! But why? It seems to have to do with our perception that once something is outside of our bodies it is not longer quite part of us anymore—it becomes alien and suspicious—it has renounced its citizenship and becomes something to be rejected.

… there is nothing outside the text. There are no origins, there is only production, and we produce our “selves

The bowerbird, like the spider, does not really have to understand what he is doing; he simply finds himself hard at work, he knows not why, creating an edifice that is crucial to his success as a bowerbird. But the strangest and most wonderful constructions in the whole animal world are the amazing, intricate constructions made by the primate, Homo sapiens. Each normal individual of this species makes a self. Out of its brain it spins a web of words and deeds, and, like the other creatures, it doesn’t have to know what it’s doing; it just does it. This web protects it, just like the snail’s shell, and provides it a livelihood, just like the spider’s web, and advances its prospects for sex, just like the bowerbird’s bower. Unlike a spider, an individual human doesn’t just exude its web; more like a beaver, it works hard to gather the materials out of which it builds its protective fortress. Like a bowerbird, it appropriates many found objects which happen to delight it —or its mate—including many that have been designed by others for other purposes. This “web of discourses

The most obvious difference in our environment that would explain this difference in our behavior is the behavior itself. Our human environment contains not just food and shelter, enemies to fight or flee, and conspecifics with whom to mate, but words, words, words. These words are potent elements of our environment that we readily incorporate, ingesting and extruding them, weaving them like spiderwebs into self-protective strings of narrative. Indeed, as we saw in chapter 7, when we let in these words, these meme-vehicles, they tend to take over, creating us out of the raw materials they find in our brains. Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control, and self-definition is not spinning webs or building dams, but telling stories, and more particularly concocting and controlling the story we tell others—and ourselves—about who we are. And just as spiders don’t have to think, consciously and deliberately, about how to spin their webs, and just as beavers, unlike professional human engineers, do not consciously and deliberately plan the structures they build, we (unlike professional human storytellers) do not consciously and deliberately figure out what narratives to tell and how to tell them. Our tales are spun, but for the most part we don’t spin them; they spin us. Our human consciousness, and our narrative selfhood, is their product, not their source.

In chapter 11 we saw that while consciousness appears to be continuous, in fact it is gappy. A self could be just as gappy, lapsing into nothingness as easily as a candle flame is snuffed, only to be rekindled at some later time, under more auspicious circumstances. Are you the very person whose kindergarten adventures you sketchily recall (sometimes vividly, sometimes dimly)? Are the adventures of that child, whose trajectory through space and time has apparently been continuous with the trajectory of your body, your very own adventures? That child with your name, a child whose scrawled signature on a crayon drawing reminds you of the way you used to sign your name—is (was) that child you?

Whatever happens, where or when, we’re prone to wonder who or what’s responsible. This leads us to discover explanations that we might not otherwise imagine, and that helps us predict and control not only what happens in the world, but also what happens in our minds. But what if those same tendencies should lead us to imagine things and causes that do not exist? Then we’ll invent false gods and superstitions and see their hand in every chance coincidence. Indeed, perhaps that strange word “I

I just had a good idea

A self, according to my theory, is not any old mathematical point, but an abstraction defined by the myriads of attributions and interpretations (including self-attributions and self-interpretations) that have composed the biography of the living body whose Center of Narrative Gravity it is.

Thus do we build up a defining story about ourselves, organized around a sort of basic blip of self-representation (Dennett, 1981a). The blip isn’t a self, of course; it’s a representation of a self (and the blip on the radar screen for Ellis Island isn’t an island—it’s a representation of an island).

And where is the thing your self-representation is about? It is wherever you are (Dennett, 1978b). And what is this thing? It’s nothing more than, and nothing less than, your center of narrative gravity.

There you are, sitting in the chair, reading my book and raising challenges. And curiously enough, your current embodiment, though a necessary precondition for your creation, is not necessarily a requirement for your existence to be prolonged indefinitely. Now if you were a soul, a pearl of immaterial substance, we could “explain

half-life

The phenomena of human consciousness have been explained in the preceding chapters in terms of the operations of a “virtual machine,

The “software

virtual machine

…we see that some of the “obvious

the capacity to suffer is a function of the capacity to have articulated, wide-ranging, highly discriminative desires, expectations, and other sophisticated mental states. Human beings are not the only creatues smart enough to suffer; Bentham’s horse and dog show by their behavior that they have enough mental complexity to distinguish—and care about—a spectrum of pains and other impositions that is far from negligible, even if it is a narrow window compared to the scope of possibilities of human suffering. Other mammals, notably apes, elephants, and dolphins, apparently have much greater ranges.

She concludes that “Suffering by the emotional mind is revealed by animals that have enough of a rational mind to be able to do something about the conditions that make them suffer,

it is also likely that organisms without the capacity to do anything to remove themselves from a source of danger would not evolve the capacity to suffer. There would be no evolutionary point in a tree which was having its branches cut off having the capacity to suffer in silence

Only a theory that explained conscious events in terms of unconscious events could explain consciousness at all. If your model of how pain is a product of brain activity still has a box in it labeled “pain,

then a miracle occurs

There may be motives for thinking that consciousness cannot be explained, but, I hope I have shown, there are good reasons for thinking that it can. My explanation of consciousness is far from complete. One might even say that it was just a beginning, but it is a beginning, because it breaks the spell of the enchanted circle of ideas that made explaining consciousness seem impossible. I haven’t replaced a metaphorical theory, the Cartesian Theater, with a nonmetaphorical (“literal, scientific

In some regards, you could say that my theory identifies conscious experiences with information-bearing events in the brain—since that’s all that’s going on, and many of the brain events bear a striking resemblance to denizens of the heterophenomenological worlds of the subjects.